


God Dies

by pallidiflora



Category: Silent Hill
Genre: Abuse, Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Coercion, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, M/M, Post-Game, Religious Themes, Second Person Perspective, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 15:07:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallidiflora/pseuds/pallidiflora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are thirty years old, and this is your life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	God Dies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinneas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinneas/gifts), [morphogenesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphogenesis/gifts), [forparadise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forparadise/gifts).



> This is set after the secret ending, where Josh reappears in their bedroom—it is, of course, left ambiguous as to what that really means, but I wanted to write something where he's (literally) come back to life. Please, please heed the warnings on this. 
> 
> As always, this is for Sarah, as well as Emily and Vivs.

You are thirty years old, and this is your life so far.  
  


* * *

 

A couple days after your twenty-third birthday, you begin packing—only in the superficial sense, though. Photos are tossed wholesale into the trash, frames and all; same with Shepherd family antiques, "Master of Arms" carved into all of them, worth a hundred bucks a pop on eBay. Tarnished candlesticks and your mother's ancient Singer sewing machine, tablecloths and your father's Winchester rifle, you pack all of it in boxes and just give it away. You give a chest-of-drawers and a TV to Elle; you give Wheeler your mom's godawful chintz couch and some fine silverware.

You burn the paintings and portraits in the backyard.

Josh's toys are a different matter. He helps you gather up his things, and you pile all his plastic soldiers and tanks and pristine footballs into cardboard boxes; he watches as you seal them all with packing tape.

"Are they gonna be able to breathe in there?" is what he says.

What you pack is a knapsack full of useless little things. Everything you're taking is useless, Josh's giant American flag and an old cassette tape and your dad's DD Form 214. You take the old bottle of good scotch that he refused to open. You fold his army jacket at the bottom and you lay his medals on top: Purple Heart, Silver Star, Good Conduct Award; you keep his dog tags around your neck.

These are reminders, not sentimentality.

You row out into the centre of Toluca Lake and watch as the Shepherd family ring spirals toward the bottom.

 

* * *

 

You're twenty-three, and you're not Alex Shepherd from Shepherd's Glen anymore. You and Lillian and Adam and Josh are from Cotton Township, Minnesota. You had a normal childhood; you liked high school alright and you graduated from Ridgewater College. You were in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division in the U.S. army. You played college football and you got into boys-will-be-boys mischief. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you were loved.

This is all thanks to Deputy Wheeler.

Wheeler's checking over all your papers; to see if your mother's maiden name matches up on each one, to see if the gold seal on your new birth certificate looks real, to once-over the footprints of an unknown baby he's put on the back. The papers say that Josh is nine—which he is, though he is supposed to be thirteen; chalk it up to Silent Hill magic or time travel or whatever, either way you don't like to think too hard about it. Josh doesn't talk about it, which suits you fine. The papers also say his middle name is Joey when in reality it was Ishmael; there's no ulterior motive for changing this, you both just hated the name.

"Are you sure about this?" Wheeler says. He's wearing one of your father's old pairs of cufflinks, because he's not ridiculous like you are; he knows they're only clothes, only gold and silver and glass. He'd always liked them, he'd said, and so you had pressed your dad's entire collection of watches and rings on him.

"Yeah," is all you can say, because you are.

"Well, take care then."

You and Josh are loading the boxes into your dad's old squad car—Josh's clothes, Josh's toys, Josh's crayons. You put your knapsack in last, and you realize that your dad's old scotch is already gone.

"I miss mom," Josh says as he buckles himself in.

All you can say is "I know," and you turn the key in the ignition.

 

* * *

 

You're twenty-four and you're settled in New York, dark and faceless and perfect; there are three Alex Shepherds in Long Island City alone. You've joined the police force and Josh goes to Most Precious Blood School; you're still Catholic, you suppose, and it's almost like you're back home again. Some of Josh's antique tin soldiers paid for that, and he doesn't even realize they're gone; otherwise your salary goes toward beer and rent and instant noodles. A few times a week your elderly neighbour Mrs. Berkowitz will slip Josh a few quarters for the school's hot lunch, and he has Applejacks for dinner most nights because you can't convince him otherwise.

You're not his father, you're not _your_ father; you're not raising him.

You can't afford cable so you watch Chinese soap operas on repeat and Josh gets on his hands and knees looking for dead flies and roaches; you play video games on the little TV in your cramped living room and sometimes you toss around a football if you're really bored.

You do this because you have no idea what else to do.

 

* * *

 

You are twenty-eight years old.

You've got a little limp and a raised white pucker on your thigh, and sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and you can feel the drill bit boring through your muscles and skin; a nice parting gift from Porphyria's mother. It doesn't matter much, since most days are spent doing paperwork, sitting at the bar, making use of the shower curtain rod as a chin-up bar.

You keep yourself busy.

It gives you a little bit of satisfaction to imagine your parents' faces if they knew Josh was going to a secular high school. You've liked to imagine their faces in a variety of situations: when you threw out all of your mother's needlepoint wall-hangings (baby-faced angels stitched from a pattern like some sort of housewife paint-by-numbers; _like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him_ ); when you pawned Josh's old rosary (pearl and silver; you got a hundred bucks for it and spent it on a call girl who dressed up like a nurse for you, who you sent away without even taking your pants off); when you started using Josh's first communion box as a place to put candy wrappers.

"Isn't that thing supposed to be holy?" Josh says one day as you snub out your joint on its lacquered wooden bottom. It's a bad habit you've picked up, but you've got a pretty good collection of roaches buried underneath gum blister packs and tissues; bad habits seem a lot easier to pick up nowadays, irony of ironies.

Some cop you are.

You cut the weed out after a couple of months, though; more expensive than you remember as a teenager, mostly pointless, gave your clothes and Josh's the perennial stink of reefer. You've got more money for laundry now, though, even though you need it less. Still, most of the time you sacrifice your own clean clothes so you can get a twenty-four pack or maybe a sixty of bourbon; you let Josh wash his own because his teachers already think he's a stoner and the last thing he needs is to smell like sweat and the mildew of your apartment. Josh likes to remind you how mom would do laundry—meticulously separating lights and darks, ironing and sorting and folding your underwear, keeping the pleats in your father's slacks sharp as knives—and you just pick stray threads from the hem of your t-shirts.

One day you finally say "you shut the goddamn fuck up about mom or I swear to God, Josh—" and you turn the TV up louder.

You're becoming more like your father than you realize.

 

* * *

 

You're twenty-nine and Josh is fifteen, when really he's supposed to be nineteen. The gulf between you seems larger now, probably because it is—it's like you're not even brothers, not even family really since you sure as hell aren't his dad; whatever is between you transcends labels, though not in a way you can or want to articulate.

This is what you tell yourself, at least, when you catch yourself looking at the curve of his neck, the backs of his knees. When you drop him off at school you notice the girls his age eyeing him too, warily but with appraisal, like lionesses, or perhaps more aptly like gazelles; they remind you of Elle—bright, tough as nails, mouths hard, with transparent carapaces, ponytails and jeans. (You want to give her a call, but can't face it, though what exactly it is you can't face you're not sure—raw flesh and too many limbs, her plaid bedspread and her lips on your cheek (just once), her rolled eyes, her raised eyebrows.)

Either way, Josh is beginning to grow into himself: a stronger jaw, long fingers, a soldier's shoulders. (You try to think of this clinically, or at least distantly, the way a proud uncle might describe his nephew, but of course it doesn't work.) The girls never speak to him, though; he has few friends, and spends more time walking in scrubby parks, hunched over an old computer made from scrap parts, stealing the neighbours' wi-fi.

"How come you don't have a girlfriend?" you say to him one night over dinner—microwaved leftovers Mrs. Berkowitz made you; she is going blind, and doesn't pick out the bones as well as she used to.

"I dunno," he says, fiddling with the tab on his pop can, a no-name Coke knockoff. "Who cares?"

"I've just seen the way girls look at you, that's all. They think you're cute."

"Yeah right." He gets up to put his dishes in the sink, and you watch the way his calves flex, the arches of his bare feet. You want to do terrible things to him, you realize, and it makes your gut flex painfully.

Later you vomit for an hour, alternating between hugging the bowl and lying almost face-down on the bathroom rug, gritty with unvacuumed dirt. You don't even have a vacuum; you should ask to borrow Mrs. Berkowitz's old one, you think. You should do a lot of things.

You tell Josh it's just something you ate. He presses a wet washclosh onto the back of your neck, clumsy, you lean into his touch and he says, "well, knowing Mrs. Berkowitz..."

You leave it at that.

 

* * *

 

You're thirty and you tell yourself—and you tell Josh—that you have no money for cable. No money for an iPod, or even a CD player. You have no money for brand-name clothes or brand-name cola or brand-name toothpaste.

You tell Josh you don't have money for shit, and still, every Friday you rack up your bar tab and come back soused, and tired, and desperate.

This time it's 3:12 AM exactly when you come in the door; it took you two minutes to get the key in the lock, hands fumbling and shaking, vision doubling. Josh is still awake, huddled in front of the blue glow of the TV playing some game—you're too bombed to tell.

"Hey," he says.

You stumble toward the hall closet, intending to take your jacket off, but you only make it as far as the wall when you slump against it, head spinning. _You piece of shit_ , you think, _you can't even fucking walk_. Josh sees you and he gets up from the ancient armchair, tripping a little in his haste, the chair creaking; he props you up with one arm, helping you out of your coat.

"You gonna be ok?" is all he says; maybe he's sympathetic, maybe he's disappointed, maybe he's resigned. You can't tell, the hall is too dark; the light from the TV makes him look drowned.

You lean against his shoulder, breathing wetly, inhaling his smell—cheap deodorant, hair, faint mildew. You are not too drunk to get half-hard from that alone; arousal clenches in your gut like a fist, like a weapon.

"Josh," you say, your hot scotch whiskey breath against his neck, your stubble on the shell of his ear. Pressing your hard-on against his thigh, you say, "come on, Josh."

"Alex," he's saying against your jaw, "Alex, what're—"

You press his hand against your cock through your uniform pants. "It's okay," you say, "it's okay," almost coming in your pants, mouthing at his neck.

"Alex—"

"Josh," you're grinding hard against his thigh, "I'm gonna nail you so hard, I'm gonna fuck your brains out—" You're babbling, you don't even know what you're saying.

"Alex, you're wasted." He holds you at arms' length, face shadowed.

"I'm sorry," you say. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and you say, "I'm sorry. You're all I've got, you know that? I'm sorry."

He hangs your coat up in the closet and leaves you in the hallway, slouched over and weeping—like a sore, not tears but something filthy.

 

* * *

 

You don't talk about it. For all intents and purposes it never happened; "it never happened" is like a litany running through your life—a hymn to a god of willful ignorance. 

A week later you try to pour all your liquor into the sink in a fit of piety; feeling wholesome, you watch the whiskey and rum swirling down the drain, reeking, the colour of cloudy amber. You can't bring yourself to get rid of the two-four in the fridge though, reasoning you'll drink it slowly and then be done with it for good.

You're on your fifth beer by the time Josh comes home from school; not nearly enough to get drunk off, but enough to give you a buzz, enough to take away the restless edge. You lie on your back, watching your ceiling fan wobble and clank; another thing you needed to fix but never did. You think of this in the past tense—it feels like there's no point now.

"You home?" Josh calls, making noises in the kitchen.

"Yeah. Come here for a sec."

He comes in and sits at the edge of your bed, his knee touching your foot; this gesture, while probably unintentional, feels intimate enough to make your palms sweat. You sit up, and put a tentative arm around his shoulders—you tell yourself, as you have told yourself too many times before, that it is brotherly, innocuous, nothing untoward.

For Josh's part, he doesn't react much.

"Look, I," is how you begin, but you don't have anything to say. Instead, you lower your arm to his waist, and he leans into the touch a little; your faces are inches apart, you are staring at each other. His eyes flicker to your lips, and you pull him in against you, kissing his chin and then his mouth. You know you must taste of beer, that your stubble must be chafing his lips, but you reach for his cock through his cargo shorts, squeezing; you want to fuck him, to be inside him, so bad your dick aches.

You push him into the mattress (not press or lower, but _push_ , as in raw, as in ungentle), between his legs, grinding against him, and he says " _Alex_ ," a startled gasp, but he doesn't push you away; his hands hover on your shoulderblades.

"Josh," you say against his temples, fumbling in your bedside drawer for something slick, anything, panting hot on his skin, "I love you, okay, I love you so fucking much—"

He looks wide-eyed at you as you take your cock out of your pants, hard as a rock; his face is pinched as you enter him, maybe in pain or maybe in pleasure; he gasps haltingly with every thrust, you fuck him hard.

 

* * *

 

Afterward you sit at the edge of the bed for what feels like hours, Josh sleeping on the other side, cocooned in the blankets like a pupating luna moth—scientific name _Actias luna_ , of the Saturniidae family. You remember Josh, thirteen, showing you the specimen he found in Central Park, delicate, skeletal, ghastly.  
  
It makes you sick.  
  
You are thirty years old, you think, face in your hands, and you feel like you're twelve again.

**Author's Note:**

> No one ever came to me and said, "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God. Somebody's been stuffing you." It wasn't a murder. I think God just died of old age. —Frances Farmer


End file.
